Jerry McCrea/The Star-LedgerConstruction workers have built a support to Tonnelle Avenue at the designated entranceway to the ARC Tunnel Construction site in North Bergen, in this September 2010 photo.

TRENTON — New Jersey has been given a final deadline of next Tuesday to appeal or repay a $271 million bill from the federal government for work done on the canceled ARC commuter train tunnel to New York City.

The one-week reprieve is the third — and last — extension the Federal Transit Administration is permitted to give.

Gov. Chris Christie derailed the Access to the Region’s Core tunnel 12 weeks ago, but he and Uncle Sam have been like locomotives heading toward one another on the tracks.

Last month, Christie said the federal government was holding New Jersey to a different standard than other states that canceled public works projects, and contended the FTA was relying on "bureaucratic power plays to wring even more money from New Jerseyans."

And last week, during a visit to the offices of the Wall Street Journal, the governor said the federal government released the money even though the tunnel did not have final approval or safeguards in place to guard against waste.

"That’s my argument of why I don’t have to pay the money back," he told the newspaper.

NJ Transit retained the Patton Boggs law firm of Washington, D.C., at an hourly rate of $485, to fight the FTA bill.

Citing billions of dollars in likely cost overruns, Christie on Oct. 27 terminated the planned 9-mile-long tunnel from Secaucus to West 34th Street in Manhattan. The $9.8 billion project was expected to double rail capacity to the city in the nation’s busiest rail corridor.

Christie plans to use some of the money from the tunnel project — including $1.8 billion from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey — to prop up the state’s nearly bankrupt Transportation Trust Fund that pays for road and bridge repairs and transit services.

"In essence, the governor wants the Port Authority to help fill his budget gap," Schumer said at a breakfast in Manhattan today, according to a report on the New York Times website. He also criticized Christie’s decision to cancel the tunnel as "terrible, terrible."

"Where was the senior senator from New York with funding alternatives to a project that was predicted to run billions over projections — all of which was to be borne by New Jersey and its taxpayers?" retorted Christie spokesman Michael Drewniak. "This was a ‘bi-state’ project for which Sen. Schumer’s state and the federal government were set to pay nothing for the cost overruns."

"We can live with the criticism while protecting taxpayers from this boondoggle, which was simply a bad deal for New Jersey," Drewniak added.

The FTA said in a Nov. 24 letter to NJ Transit that if the debt to the federal government became delinquent, it would charge New Jersey interest, could report the claim to commercial credit bureaus and reserved the right to forward it to the U.S. Department of Justice for debt collection.